Kick off the school year with NLP’s fall news literacy webinar series

The News Literacy Project is hosting a four-part series of professional learning webinars focused on essential news literacy concepts. In these sessions, educators will learn about these concepts, discuss curriculum integration and how to use resources from the News Literacy Project. This series is free for educators.

Session 1 – Teaching news literacy: Where do I start? Sept. 3 at 4 p.m CT

• We’ll provide an overview of key news literacy concepts and essential questions to develop learning objectives for students to become reliably informed, such as recognizing the difference between news and opinion, identifying the primary purpose of information, understanding how news judgment is made, evaluating evidence and sources, using fact-checking and digital verification tools, and recognizing the standards of quality journalism.

Session 2 – Exploring the misinformation landscape, Sept. 10 at 4 p.m. CT

• Learn how to teach students to move beyond the unhelpful term “fake news” to more precisely identify the many types of misleading, inaccurate and false information that they encounter. We will discuss NLP’s taxonomy for five different types of misinformation, explore motivations behind different types of propagators of misinformation, discuss ways people are manipulated through emotions and cognitive biases and examine effective debunking strategies. By teaching a deeper understanding of misinformation, students can become less susceptible to it and more likely to prioritize reliable, verified sources of news and information.

Session 3 – Understanding bias, Sept. 17 at 4 p.m. CT

• People frequently perceive and allege bias in news coverage, but what does this really mean? What makes a piece of news biased, and who decides? What role do our own biases play in our perceptions of bias? In this session we’ll help you teach this vital, controversial, complex topic in ways that empower students to meaningfully evaluate the fairness and impartiality of news coverage.

Session 4 – Using resources from the News Literacy Project, Sept. 24 at 4 p.m. CT

• NLP offers a variety of free, ready-made classroom resources and supports to help you teach news literacy. In this session, we’ll help you get started with the Checkology® virtual classroom, an e-learning platform with 14 lessons and dozens of supplemental activities that you can use synchronously and asynchronously with students. We’ll also discuss strategies for using NLP’s weekly newsletter, The Sift®, with students, and we’ll take a tour of NLP’s educator resources library and the NewsLit Nation forum.

Register for NLP’s fall webinar series here.

With your registration, you will have access to all four webinars as well as the recordings. NLP will provide a certificate of attendance for those educators who join the live webinars.  If you have any questions, please contact NLP’s Professional Learning team at [email protected].